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Related papers: Debunk the Myth of SFT Generalization

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Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on domain-specific data is the dominant approach for adapting foundation models to specialized tasks. However, it has been observed that SFT models tend to forget knowledge acquired during pretraining. In vision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Xingyuan Pan , Hanning Zhang , Chenlu Ye , Rui Pan , Tong Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Mrinal Rawat , Arkajyoti Chakraborty , Neha Gupta , Roberto Pieraccini

In natural language processing tasks, pure reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning methods often suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence; while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods, although efficient in training, have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Min Zeng , Jingfei Sun , Xueyou Luo , Caiquan Liu , Shiqi Zhang , Li Xie , Xiaoxin Chen

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise in video understanding. However, their reasoning often suffers from thinking drift and weak temporal comprehension, even when enhanced by Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques like…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Peiyao Wang , Haotian Xu , Noranart Vesdapunt , Rui Hou , Jingyi Zhang , Haibin Ling , Oleksandr Obiednikov , Ning Zhou , Kah Kuen Fu

Large language models have achieved significant reasoning improvements through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Yet as model capabilities grow, constructing high-quality reward signals becomes increasingly difficult,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Salman Rahman , Jingyan Shen , Anna Mordvina , Hamid Palangi , Saadia Gabriel , Pavel Izmailov

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Chongli Qin , Jost Tobias Springenberg

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of foundation models often leads to poor generalization, where prior capabilities deteriorate after tuning on new tasks or domains. Inspired by trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) and proximal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Xingwu Sun , Di Wang , Pengfei Liu

Visual reasoning abilities play a crucial role in understanding complex multimodal data, advancing both domain-specific applications and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Existing methods enhance Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Huajie Tan , Yuheng Ji , Xiaoshuai Hao , Xiansheng Chen , Pengwei Wang , Zhongyuan Wang , Shanghang Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

The prevailing post-training paradigm for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) - Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) - suffers from an intrinsic optimization mismatch: the rigid supervision inherent in SFT induces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Zhengyang Zhao , Lu Ma , Yizhen Jiang , Xiaochen Ma , Zimo Meng , Chengyu Shen , Lexiang Tang , Haoze Sun , Peng Pei , Wentao Zhang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Chao Xue , Yao Wang , Mengqiao Liu , Di Liang , Xingsheng Han , Peiyang Liu , Xianjie Wu , Chenyao Lu , Lei Jiang , Yu Lu , Haibo Shi , Shuang Liang , Minlong Peng , Flora D. Salim

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

Simulation offers a scalable and low-cost way to enrich vision-language-action (VLA) training, reducing reliance on expensive real-robot demonstrations. However, most sim-real co-training methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Liangzhi Shi , Shuaihang Chen , Feng Gao , Yinuo Chen , Kang Chen , Tonghe Zhang , Hongzhi Zang , Weinan Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Li Shen , Jing Bai , Kam-Fai Wong

Understanding how language model capabilities transfer from pretraining to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to efficient model development and data curation. In this work, we investigate four core questions: RQ1. To what extent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Simin Fan , Dimitris Paparas , Natasha Noy , Binbin Xiong , Noveen Sachdeva , Berivan Isik

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mark Rofin , Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion